Surrey County Council will be discussing the petition for a new Thames Ditton Secondary School at 11:30 on the 12th February. Louise McDonagh of the parents' action group, the author of the article in TD Today Winter issue, will be speaking to the petition. Your support in attendance at the meeting would be a helpful signal to the Council.

Parents of prospective secondary pupils should also be sure to view and contribute to the Hinchley Wood School consultation on admissions for the coming September: seehttp://www.hinchleywoodschool.co.uk/152/admissions-consultation-september-2015 (http://www.hinchleywoodschool.co.uk/152/admissions-consultation-september-2015). Consultation closes on 21 February.

Esher High is also having a consultation.

Louise comments that the feeder schools proposition in these consultations should be supported by Thames Ditton residents. Also, it is still not clear why Hinchley Wood has not addressed the sibling rule (and this could become a real issue even if it is not significant just yet); and that perhaps it might be worth asking HW to place the feeder school criterion above the sibling rule criterion as well.

Courtesy of Louise McDonagh, to whom all parents should be grateful for organising and driving this forward, you may download here (http://residents-association.com/pdfs/school_petition_Feb2014.pdf) the notes of the SCC hearing on the petition.

The Council's official response subsequent to the hearing is below:

"Council response to petition 'TDittonSchool' The Cabinet Member for Schools and Learning considered this petition at herdecision making meeting on 12 February 2014 and agreed the followingresponse:

"We monitor the demand for school places carefully and have had severalmeetings with all parties regarding the sufficiency of secondary schoolplaces in Elmbridge, particularly in the south part of the Borough. Ourpresent forecast data indicates that there are sufficient places in theborough overall; for 2014 these will be provided by Esher High School,Heathside, Hinchley Wood, RES and The Cobham Free School. We have alsoplanned for additional places to be available from 2015 onwards in linewith our forecast data.

Surrey County Council is also concerned that its secondary schools arelarge enough to provide the breadth of curriculum and subject optionsrequired by young people in order to equip them for the future. This meansthat our secondary schools need to be at least six forms of entry (i.e. 180students per year group) to be viable and possibly even larger than this infuture. Where we only need one or two additional forms we would always lookto expand existing successful schools in the first instance.

We are keeping a close eye on the situation in Elmbridge and will adjustour strategy if and when we feel there is a need. However as localauthorities can no longer promote new community schools any new secondaryschool would have to be an academy or Free School."

...and from the Telegraph: " Tens of thousands of children face losing the automatic right to a place at their local secondary school amid a surge in the number of comprehensives using lottery-style admissions policies.

Some one in 12 schools is shunning traditional catchment areas in favour of rules designed to engineer a more balanced student body and break the middle-class stranglehold on places.

The shift is being driven by a rise in the number of academies and free schools whose admissions policies are independent of local council control. The head of one major chain of academies said it was no longer “inherently fair or good for our society” to let parents move into the catchment area of a leading school to get a place. "

One of the ?unintended consequences of the present government's policies of encouraging academies and free schools and of not allowing councils to open new state schools. You may easily imagine the anomalies (e.g. siblings) which a lottery would throw up.

The Hinchley Wood School's Governing Body has approved the proposed changes to the school’s Admissions Criteria for September 2015 which include Thames Ditton Juniors becoming a linked feeder school - Press Release (http://www.hinchleywoodschool.co.uk/uploads/asset_file/3_0_press-release-april-2014.pdf)

It's not just Secondary School places that are causing problems. Some friends of ours have failed to get their daughter into either Thames Ditton Infants or Hinchley Wood Primary, despite living in a flat overlooking Giggs Hill Green - 800m away from both of them as the crow flies. They've instead been offered a place for her at Chandlers Field School in Molesey instead, which was not on their list at all, and they're understandably quite upset about this.

Similar problems for some other friends of ours who live in Claygate - they didn't get any of their choices either, and their daughter has been offered a place at Bell Farm Junior school in Hersham.

I had to look up where chandlers is and it's all the way over in west molesey - I make it just shy of 3 miles or almost an hours walk for them. And the fact is it's not got a very high ofsted rating at all must only add to their concerns.

Who are they losing out to? Is it children that live closer than 800m? How do the schools allocate places? Is it distance first? Do siblings take priority over distance?